The Telos Press Podcast: Kyle Baasch on Adorno and Foucault in San Francisco

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Kyle Baasch about his article “Critical Theory in the Flesh: Adorno and Foucault in San Francisco,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discussed how Foucault’s aversion to Marxism relates to his notion of the individual as endlessly transfiguring itself through acts of creative self-invention; how Adorno interprets the freedom of the subject within the context of consumer culture and exchange society; the influence of Adorno’s experience as a heartbroken lover on his conception of happiness, particularly in Minima Moralia; how Adorno’s notion of happiness relates to the conception of harmony that Foucault criticizes; and the extent to which the two thinkers can be put into conversation. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Timothy W. Luke on Screens of Power

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Tim Luke about his book Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, recently published in a new edition by Telos Press and available for 20% off in our online store. Their discussion covers a range of topics, including the definition of informational society, the transformation of consumers into data and capital assets, the shift toward permissive individualism and consumerism, the commodification of tradition and religion by televangelism, the rise of politics as televisual spectacle, the changing character of social movements, and the role of critics and intellectuals. Listen the podcast here or through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or your preferred podcast provider.

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Liberalism between Scylla and Charybdis

In 1972, Irving Kristol noted the striking fact that the New Left seemed to lack a coherent economic critique of the status quo, besides occasional Marxist platitudes borrowed from the Old Left:

The identifying marks of the New Left are its refusal to think economically and its contempt for bourgeois society precisely because this is a society that does think economically.

What really ailed American society, and what the New Left could sense but not articulate, Kristol wrote, was a spiritual malady. Despite the efforts of Burkean conservatives, the “accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral philosophy” had been steadily depleting since the French Revolution, and with its depletion, so too society’s abilities to cope with the material inequalities, resentments, and indignities made inevitable by the free exchange of goods and services.

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Telos 187 (Summer 2019): Carl Schmitt and the Critique of Technical Rationality

Telos 187 (Summer 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.

After a modern era of technological progress that has led humans to believe in their increasing ability to control nature, we are reaching a point at which this power on a small scale has given way to increasing uncertainty and uncontrollability on the large scale. Not only are the specific effects of climate change difficult to predict and control, the only mechanisms available for such control—agreement and cooperation across national and cultural divides—are not the stuff of engineering but of politics. So with every technological advance that promises to bring us more control over our lives, we as a species are facing ever greater risks and uncertainties. The question concerning technology has become the unpredictability and uncontrollability of its development itself. The key difficulty is a problem of a tension between community or national interests and species-wide interests. While there might be an ethical imperative on a species-wide level to exercise self-restraint in pursuing dangerous technologies such as nuclear weapons, gene manipulation, or coal-fired power plants, such self-restraint could very well lead to the decline or even annihilation of the group that exercises it. The path forward will not be revealed by new technological advances, which can easily create more problems than they solve, but through the development of new ethical, political, and affective frameworks by which people understand themselves and their connections to the rest of the world. This issue of Telos, devoted to Carl Schmitt and the critique of technical rationality, investigates the ways in which Schmitt’s critique moved him toward ways of considering law, politics, and human history as fundamentally uncertain movements, requiring strategies that accept such unpredictability even as we try to intervene in our historical development as a species.

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On Marcuse, Phenomenology, and Marxism

As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Jack Robert Edmunds-Coopey looks at Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” from Telos 4 (Fall 1969).

Herbert Marcuse’s “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism” (1928) continues his efforts at fusing a contemporary form of Marxism with the work of his doctoral supervisor Martin Heidegger and his phenomenological project in Sein und Zeit (1927). The central tenet that Marcuse uses to construct a thread between Marxism and phenomenology is the analysis of the concrete and the correctness of knowledge as a truth related to this concreteness. The significance of Marxism as a theory of analysis is its self-reflexivity, the means by which it reflects on the process of historicity itself and, in addition to this, the processes of becoming that it undergoes as a result of its historical analysis. The difference here is that phenomenology claims to investigate the essences of things but does not concern itself with its own method or with a dialectical approach between the abstract and concrete, which inevitably occur as one attempts to capture a representation of an object.

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Telos 173 (Winter 2015): Gillian Rose

Telos 173 (Winter 2015) is now available for purchase in our store.

Gillian Rose (1947–1995) had an influence in excess of her literary output and treatment in secondary literature. Author of eight books, two articles, and four book reviews, she also had important, though perhaps hidden, effects on the UK academic scene through academic friendship, doctoral supervision, and interdisciplinary work. She inspired many students and colleagues, even where she does not appear in bibliographies or citations. She made major contributions to introducing the Frankfurt School to the UK; aided the Hegel renaissance in English-language scholarship; and was an early critic of post-structuralism and political theology. Several of the papers gathered here were first given at a conference at Durham University on January 9, 2015, to mark the twentieth year since Rose’s death. That conference and this special issue of Telos are premised on the view that Rose’s work still has much philosophical insight and inspiration to offer. The authors of these papers were students, colleagues, and/or friends of Rose, or studied her work as part of their doctoral research. The diversity of their fields reflects some of the range and interdisciplinarity of Rose’s own work: Hegel, social theory, Marxism, politics, race, recognition theory, education, and theology. We hope that this issue provokes a renewed interest in what Rose can still offer us today.

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